Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs

Date Written: July 31, 2019

Abstract

We develop empirically-grounded estimates of willingness-to-pay to avoid excess mortality risks caused by climate change. Using 40 countries' subnational data, we estimate a mortality-temperature relationship that enables global extrapolation to countries without data and projection of its future evolution, accounting for adaptation benefits. Further, we develop a revealed preference approach to recover unobserved adaptation costs. We combine these components with 33 high-resolution climate simulations, which produces a right-skewed distribution of global WTP with a mean of $38.1 per tCO2 under a high emissions scenario. Projections generally indicate increased mortality in today's poor locations and higher adaptation expenditures in rich ones.

Carleton, Tamma and Delgado, Michael and Greenstone, Michael and Houser, Trevor and Hsiang, Solomon and Hultgren, Andrew and Jina, Amir and Kopp, Robert E. and McCusker, Kelly and Nath, Ishan and Rising, James and Rode, Ashwin and Seo, Hee Kwon and Simcock, Justin and Viaene, Arvid and Yuan, Jiacan and Zhang, Alice Tianbo, Valuing the Global Mortality Consequences of Climate Change Accounting for Adaptation Costs and Benefits (July 31, 2019). University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics Working Paper No. 2018-51. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3224365 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3224365

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